Even when they aren’t wetting themselves, vomiting due to Norovirus, or expelling more snot than Slimer from Ghostbusters, children are still disgusting, filthy, disease vectors. And their hands are all over the lab keyboards. We do some cleaning, but there’s a very fine line between effective disinfecting and destroying the keyboard.

“We’ve plugged the laptop in,” came the call from the exam room, “but it’s not letting us log in… we think there might be something wrong with the network port though…”

Normally I try to discourage too much technical self-diagnosis from my users, but in this case, they were not wrong. See if you can determine what’s the problem is with this network port though a simple observational test:

What's wrong with this network port (apart from it being a single socket and being labelled 'RM')

Hot chocolate is a delicious beverage, and co-incidentally the only hot beverage I will drink. Yes, that does mean I don’t drink coffee. Try not to fall off of your chair in stupefied shock.

Hot chocolate is not, however, particularly conducive to enhancing the performance of your laptop in any way, as a teacher recently found out when her ham-fisted son managed to spill some straight into his barely-new home laptop.

And then waited a week.

After an initial diagnosis this week, the laptop has gotten off pretty lightly. The last time I saw this sort of thing, a £1000+ machine was a complete write-off. This one seems to have suffered only a dead hard drive and keyboard. On first inspection, the hard drive damage seemed mysterious; other than the fact the drive would not even spin up, it appeared relatively unscathed. However, once the drive caddy was peeled off (and I should note that normally you don’t have to ‘peel’ a drive caddy from a drive), the damage was clearer.

The combination of heat and dissolved sugar has not only corroded the exposed metal parts, but also quite literally eaten away at the PCB, leaving these small craters on the underside of the drive. This is why I have a closed-container-only policy even in my own office, and why I will practically crucify any student found in an IT lab with a drink.